In Fall 2016, I took a Political Science course in International Relations, which was an elective outside of my major. The core of the curriculum was based on learning IR perspectives: realism, liberalism, and constructivism. Aside from the power-driven motivations of realism and the overly-cooperative nature of liberalism, constructivism offered a completely different take on how we look at the world.

Constructivism taught me that we have created the world around us. As citizens, we’ve created the rules. Basically, my professor explained that we give symbols meaning – in traffic signals, we’ve assigned colors to represent stop and go (and they didn’t need to be red or green). We’ve made the norms. It’s because of constructivism that I wholeheartedly believe that we are solely responsible for changing our world if it disappoints us.
Bent, not broken is my philosophy. We will never be beyond repair. We can pick up and start again, we can reinvent the cycle.